Considering the most effective and forward-thinking form of comic book marketing has historically involved white wire, ball bearings and the garish phrase, “Hey Kids! COMICS!”, DC Comics has been going all out hyping their New 52 books. They’ve put commercials for the books on TV (Including reportedly during The Daily Show to catch that wily college potsmoking demographic), trailers in movie theaters, and print ads in straight magazines (I can’t address any idle rumors about ads in gay magazines).

And they haven’t stopped there. Rich Johnston at Bleeding Cool reported this morning that DC’s bought themselves a bunch of sponsored search terms on Twitter.

What’s that old saying? “Roofie me once; shame on you. Roofie me twice and I will pistol grip mace bomb you.”? I think it’s safe to say that I approached the new Stormwatch with exceedingly mixed feelings.

I absolutely adored the book when Warren Ellis wrote it and I followed it over into The Authority, although based on this quote I found on The Authority’s Wikipedia page, that book almost didn’t happen:

one of the reasons I turned their STORMWATCH into THE AUTHORITY is that I found out that, despite the fact that no-one was buying STORMWATCH, they kept it going because they liked reading it in the [Wildstorm] office and wanted to keep me employed. And I felt so bloody awful about that, and at the same time had been so struck by Bryan Hitch’s STORMWATCH issues, that the train of thought that led to THE AUTHORITY began.

The Authority limped through many incarnations of writer and artist after the inital Ellis/Bryan Hitch run that included Mark Millar/Frank Quietly, Robbie Morrison/Dwayne Turner, Ed Brubaker/Dustin Nguyen, Grant Morrison/Keith Giffen/Gene Ha…actually it’s around here that I started to tune out of The Authority. I think I might have picked up “The Authority/Lobo” one shots (‘cuz, you know, it’s friggin’ Lobo), but I was pretty burned out on the book. And, it didn’t help that somewhere in this time period Wildstorm tried to relaunch Stormwatch with the blatantly anemic Stormwatch: Team Achilles and Stormwatch: Post Human Division. It’s dead, Jim. Stop being a necrophiliac.

I love the Foo Fighters, but I have trouble listening to more than a song or two in a row. Because whether it’s on purpose or what I bring to the music as a listener, I very quickly become convinced that every song is Dave Grohl singing about Kurt Cobain. In Your Honor. Friend Of A Friend. My Hero. Darling Nikki. Courtney Love Chokes Pole. Rob Shouldn’t Write Reviews While Drinking. You get the point.

I got the same feeling reading Justice League International #1: almost every panel seemed like it was about the DC Comics reboot.

Look: the first line in the book is:

Confidence in every level of authority is at an all-time low.”

A page later, this exchange between a member of the UN Security Council and head of UN intelligence Andre Briggs happens:

Zachary Levi, bona fide nerd and star of NBC’s “Chuck” seems to have popularized the concept on his Twitter late last month, a response to the “planking” craze.

Levi tweeted a photo he found of a man hanging upside down by his feet in a doorway, not unlike a scene in the 1989 “Batman” where Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne is caught doing the same thing.

Levi’s tweets have been more and more influential ever since he launched “The Nerd Machine” website just over a year ago. His supporters helped drive “Chuck” to a fifth season.

Will “Batmanning” succeed as a nerdy twist on “planking?” (“Carbonite” planking by two of the writers of the next “Star Trek” movie, notwithstanding.)

So far, a Youtube video uploaded a few days after Levi’s tweet showing various creative methods of “Batmanning” around the campus of Purdue University has 750,000 page views.

For what it’s worth, here’s that Youtube video:

I like to think of myself as a huge Batman fan, but I’m also a fan who needed Special Gym as a child. Batmanning would only lead me to bruised ankles and a cracked skull and I had quite enough of that in kindergarten. Stupid ball crawl.